Abstract
Many of us know Robin Boyd for a series of fascinating books, including India and the Latin Captivity of the Church (1974), Khristadvaita: a Theology for India (1977), introductions to individual Indian theologians, Appasamy, Parekh and Fakirbhai, but above all for the still indispensable Introduction to Indian Christian Theology (1969, enlarged edition 1975). All these were fruits of Boyd’s twenty years in Gujerat, India, where he worked as a missionary of the Irish Presbyterian Church from 1954 to 1974.
Now, forty years on and retired in Edinburgh, he has been given an opportunity by an Indian admirer, Siga Arles of the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Bangalore, to paint a rich background to his Indian years. Beyond Captivity consists of 19 pieces ‘From an Indian Desk’ and a further 12 ‘Looking Back and Looking Forward’. The overall title, ‘Beyond Captivity’, signals his recognition of an Indian Christian theology that found its own distinctive ‘shape’. After a century of missionary beginnings, Boyd identifies from about 1890 to 1920 a Gujerati Christian ‘golden age’, including the poetry of Ratnagrahi, whose hymns, ‘full of deep theological meaning, [are] still on the lips of thousands’. For this and the subsequent period, Boyd’s explorations widened, both regionally and ecumenically, to cover the work of many of those who figure in his Edinburgh doctoral thesis of 1966, ‘The Place of Dogmatic Theology in the Indian Church’, and its more popular sequel, the well-known Introduction of 1969.
Two pieces from Boyd’s Indian desk are appreciations of his ‘beloved guru’ at Basel in 1953–54, Karl Barth. Barth had given him ‘an interesting commission …When you go to India, I want you to find out if all these big thick books I have written have any meaning there or not’. For Boyd himself, they plainly had decisive meaning, and provided a reliable compass for his explorations.
These explorations have continued beyond the issues touching on Boyd’s twenty years in India, and the final twelve pieces, while giving us some of his most moving reflection on Gujerati poetry, go on to acknowledge the importance of the emergence of Dalit theology and move out to deal with aspects of critical theory and urgent issues touching upon (inter alia) Christian and Islamic eschatologies and a theology of creation.
‘Theophrastus, at four score and ten, had but begun his Characters of Men’. Robin Boyd cannot be far off four score and ten, and, with his trusty compass, continues his explorations, setting us an inspiring example.